Tuesday, 2 March 2010

First Lines

First lines are overrated things. There's a lovely character in Camus' The Plague who's trying to write a novel but is so obsessed with getting the opening line right that he dies (of plague) without having finished the first page.

Imagine a joke writer who begins by saying "An Irishman a rabbi and a flamingo walk into a bar" and then paces about his room trying to think of a punchline. Mickey Spillane, a pulp writer, put it best:

The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don't read a book to get to the middle, they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there.

Once you have decided that Othello kills his wife and then himself, the rest of the play is getting to that point by the most efficient and convincing route.

Yet first lines can be fun, and fun is more important than importance. Here are my two favourites that I doubt you know.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
- Murphyby Samuel Beckett

Oh dear reader with that positive attitude I like, happily I would lead you beneath the dark plane trees where I for the first time sat and read the bizarre story of Brother Medardus.

The Devils Elixir, ETA Hoffmann

The holy city appeared, violet, within a golden fog; it was upon an evening in a distant age; the dying of Sourya, the phoenix-like star of this ancient world, extinguished myriads of jewels on the glittering domes of Benares.

"I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child."

Your bit about the Camus character reminded me of Hugh Rowe in Michael Frayn's first novel The Tin Men (1965). Rowe is writing a novel -in office time, of course-the desk and floor are littered with rejected drafts. He has started by writing the blurb for the cover-"Hugh Rowe is a brilliant new arrival on the literary scene..."'R'is the story of a whisky priest...'R' is the story of four men marooned...'R' is the odyssey of a disillusioned writer...God he groaned perhaps it was easier to writie the book first and the jacket afterwards...he wondered which way round other writers did it"

My favourite book of this and possibly any other Christmas is Mark Forsyth's A Short History of Drunkenness - The Spectator

Sparkling, erudite and laugh out loud funny. Mark Forsyth is the kind of guide that drunks, teetotallers and light drinkers dream of to explain the ins and outs of alcohol use and abuse since the beginning of time. One of my books of the year. Immensely enjoyable. Professor Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

A Short History of Drunkenness is this year's Châteauneuf-du-Pape of Christmas books, no less. Bloody entertaining. - Emlyn Rees

Sometimes you see a book title that simply gladdens the heart. Everyone I showed this book to either smiled broadly or laughed out loud . . . This is a book of some brilliance - Daily Mail

With a great eye for a story and a counterintuitive argument, Mark Forsyth has enormous fun breezing through 10,000 years of alcoholic history in a little more than 250 pages. - The Guardian

Well researched and recounted with excellent humour, Forsyth's alcohol-ridden tale is sure to reduce anyone to a stupor of amazement. - Daily Express

This entertaining study of drunkenness makes for a racy sprint through human history - history being, as Mark Forsyth wittily puts it "the result of farmers working too hard". - The Sunday Times

This charming book proved so engrossing that while reading it I accidentally drank two bottles of wine without realising. - Rob Temple, author of Very British Problems

Taste the Elements of Eloquence

The Horologicon is out in America

The Horologicon is a book of the strangest and most beautiful words in the English language arranged by the hour of the day when you will really need them. Words for breakfast, for commuting, for working, for dining, for drinking and for getting lost on the way home. It runs from uhtceare (sadness before dawn) to curtain lecture (a telling off given by your spouse in bed). It's out all over the world and you can buy it from these lovely people: